Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Triple Town Tips and Tricks

Triple Town Tips:

[1] 4 or 5 bears is about right, sometimes 3. The key is to pay attention where you put the LAST bear, because if you have enough tombstones that's where the church will go. It's not the square the last bear was placed on, it's the space where he is when he dies, so you can let the last one wander where you want him and then drop a bush or something to seal up the area.

[2] The reason you want to do that is because a church that doesn't end up in a cathedral is useless and a waste of space. Three cathedrals ending up as a chest is your best possible result; not only do you get coins from it, but that's at least 27 bears ending up as one item you can click to clear. Two cathedrals + a crystal is almost as good.

[3] Annoyed when the piece you want to drop would be perfect if that ONE loving BEAR would just take one more step? When you buy an item from the store, it displaces your current item rather than eliminating it. Grass is very cheap and easy to get rid of, so buy that and drop your crystal or whatever on the next turn.

[4] As noted, try not to kill ninjas until they're in a place where the tombstone will help you. They're annoying, but only troublesome when space starts getting very low. If there's just one, try to wait for a bot rather than buying one. Of course, sometimes the game will send you four ninjas in five turns just to gently caress with you. When this happens, call the game a motherfucker and shake your fist at it.

[5] If you put a crystal down where it DOESN'T make a match, it forms a rock. Two rocks + a crystal -> a mountain, two mountains + a crystal -> an 1800-coin chest and 50K points. Always nice to have, especially early when you might have a rock as a starting piece and you don't have anything useful on which to use early crystals.

[6] Take it easy on the store until you're well into six figures. Build your stockpile of coins up. If you're making mountain-mountain-crystal once and an occasional cathedral-cathedral-crystal, you will probably end up coin-positive if you're not buying crystals or bots from the shop. The higher up the housing chain you are, the more effort a crystal is replacing, so save the expensive ones for when they're a big deal.

And the biggest tip:

[8] Dropping pieces randomly kills you. Don't match things because they match, match them because you can match what they create intelligently. Same-type pieces that are a knight's move apart or farther are non-optimal because even a crystal can't match them, and the higher valued they are the harder it'll be to fix.

Start by thinking at the tree level. Where do you want your next tree to be? That means bush-bush-bush with the third bush in that spot, so DON'T put anything in that spot if it'll block you from that order. Figure you'll get bushes or higher instead of grass now and then, use your storehouse liberally, and build trees near other trees.

Got the hang of it? You can put a tree right where you want it reliably without buying from the store or relying on crystals? Good. Since you can stack up trees, use them to build huts. Lather, rinse, repeat on up the housing chain.